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“One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead men got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords, and shot each other. A deaf policeman heard this noise and came to kill the two dead boys. If you don’t believe this story’s true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.”

Now, who’s afraid of the dark?

Andrew, enigmatic and calm and one half of The Ghost Quotes, says, “It’s all on a scale. A spectrum of dark and light. There’s got to be balance. Light and darkness.”
Donny, the eery poet who sings and chants to Andrew’s beat, growls in summary, “You have to take care of that darkness.”

I spoke to The Ghost Quotes about evil on a balcony in Cape Town while the first real and heavy rain of winter fell.
The Ghost Quotes is a measure of balance, a collaborative effort from the minds of two very different musicians, Andrew Winer and Donny Truter, who share a responsibility to represent the darkness.

Donny, laid back and brazen in a wife beater and a Buster Keaton hat, croaks, “I know I’m far more attracted to the things that define us as performers. Doing something lighthearted is kind of the easy way out. I like the darkness. I think the darkness needs to be looked after. Like the Beat Poets, they were dark and the Classic Poets, they were dark. It’s attractive to a small amount of people and if you do it correctly then you can change minds. You should be doing stuff at the end of the day that defines you. Don’t cater to soft hearts.”

I heard a song by these two called ‘She’s Gone.’ Then I listened to it and every other track they had on Soundcloud until my ears bled. It’s so new, so raw, so dark that it is addictive. You don’t know you love it until you’ve tried it and this genre-less, cinematic construction of sound is thick with evil. Moreish if you’re into that kind of thing.

New on the scene and fresh to the stage, in fact they are in their Initiation phase, with a debut show at FREAKSHOW and an invitation to join Psych Night at The Assembly on Saturday the 29th of March, this is only the beginning.

How did it happen?

Andrew looks at Donny, “Didn’t you call me and say lets make some evil music?”

Donny nods, “Yeah, we’ve been musical peers for a while and jammed here and there with the likes of Jeremy Loops, Taleswapper (Donny’s blues project) Two Minute Puzzle (Andrew’s previous band) and Andre Geldenhuys from Machineri and I was really attracted to his style of production. There was something just a little bit evil about it and something very nice about that evil. ‘Let’s make a really evil track just for shits and giggles,’ we said and he did the production and it was just want I wanted. It fitted with my vocal style and was the perfect marriage. It was attractive to our ears so we figured that whoever else found that attractive, would be of the same mindset. And The Ghost Quotes was born.”

How about the name?

Donny explains, “We fiddled around with the name for a while. Like crows are a talisman for spirits so we wanted to go for that. We wanted it to have an underlying dark and spiritual style.”

“Occult-ish,” Andrew says, “Actually, I think I misheard something Donny said and was like, oh yeah, The Ghost Quotes.”

Donny smiles, “And I was like, ‘No, but yes!’ That is fucking great.”

So The Ghost Quotes have risen and the sound is black, it incorporates witchy, voodoo electronic effects, strange chanting, horror-show imagery and thick, sluggish, swamp tones buried in the mud of roots music.

Donny elaborates, “I’ve been of a swampish mindset for a while. From Taleswapper which is heavy set in the blues. Andrew brings this dark production, a contemporary, electronic edge – I don’t even know what you would call this production style. Almost… glitchy.”

When you listen to The Ghost Quotes, you feel immersed. It’s full on and freaking weird but somehow there’s a story to take you through it all. Their EP, entitled Swamp Machines is a grimoire of strange stories.

Donny, who writes the lyrics explains, “I’ve been writing poetry since I was a little boy and I have a backlog of loads of poetry. I was creating something to match up with Andrew’s style which is very cinematic and there’s lots of shit going on there. We wanted to take something electronic that was more cinematic than dance floor driven or singer/songwriter driven. Really weird. The weirder the better, the darker the better and then marry the story to the style of production. Basically not all The Ghost Quotes songs are the same but there is the underlying story and that cinematic darkness.

It’s a whole, scary world to create and I want to know how that is going to translate as a stage performance.

Andrews smiles at Donny, “Should we let the cat out the bag?”

“Hey, we might as well. It’s about time,” growls Donny.

“We want it to be theatrical. We want to make the performance like a scene in a film. Difficult to relate to but strangely appealing. Right now, we’re still inside the studio, really. We know we’ve got something here but we don’t know what it is yet. It’s evil. We don’t quite know how to place it. We want to keep it dark without freaking the crowd out… but it’s super weird. Super dark. Definitely not normal. That’s pretty much as far as we go with a brief in the studio: the weirder, the better.”

As Donny mentioned before, the dark is really only a place where a few people feel at home. How is this going to work for the rest of the mortal world?

“Personally I think its going to blow my own mind and that’s when I know it’s attractive to me. When Andrew and I work together, we know when it’s rad for us, it’s ready. We write this for us. We get stoked and then we go from there. We don’t write for other people first.”

“I think people are generally too afraid to delve into things that unsettle them. The world is afraid of the darkness. People don’t take care of it enough.

Andrew certifies, “Between The Ghost Quotes now and the future I don’t foresee anything less than world domination.”

“The best place to start is at the beginning,” says Candice Ježek when we meet for tea at the busy little bar on Kloofnek. I’m chatting to the twenty-six year old artist about her debut show at Salon 91, The Witching Hour, which she shared with fellow artist, Jade Klara.

After listening to her chat about fairy tales and her art for the next two cups of tea, I want to jump to the end. The same urge you get with all good fairy tales – it’s tough to save the best ‘til last. In this case, I’m breaking the rules and telling you how it ends. As we round off the conversation and call for the bill, Candice says, “The three creatures you see in my paintings are the Stone Fox, the Inquisitive Cat and the Gentle Bear. Their meeting in the forest symbolises creative and lucky thought.”

Lucky thought. I can hardly think of anything more naturally appealing. This is the concept at the very core of the imaginary worlds Candice creates and the conversation that lead to this ‘lucky thought,’ this phrase that I haven’t stopped thinking of since her show, is a charming fairy tale in itself.

“I knew I wanted to be an artist when was I very young,” she says. I like that she became what she wanted to be when she was a little girl. Picasso used to say that the creative adult is the child who survived and Candice is this idea personified. It’s hard not to forget your dreams and she hasn’t.

“I think I’ve always had to be the one to motivate myself to keep going. I had a very difficult upbringing and I knew I would have to do it myself. This is how I used to escape. Getting caught up in pictures and drawing.”

A lot of what we spoke about that evening has stayed with me but perhaps it is those words that have stuck the most. Having always had a love affair with stories and fairy tales leads you down all kinds of roads of research and many, even most fairy tales seem to be born out of a sad place. It seems wrong that a girl as beautiful both on the inside and the outside, as Candice should have had a tough childhood. But maybe, that’s why her art is so special. It’s that lucky thought.

The Witching Hour, the perfect name for her show, had people literally spilling out onto the street on the opening night at Salon 91, trying to get in to see the display of mystical creatures, faraway dreams and runaway girls. How did it all happen?

“Jade Klara and I were talking and we had always wanted to do something together. She had the girls and I had the creatures and we wanted to somehow mix it all into this fantasy world. So it started in this way as in how you would maybe wish for something to come together. It was a wish. Jade’s always been really influenced by ghosts and spirits and poems. She reads a lot of poetry and her work is very influenced by that kind of narrative.”

If you see Candice’s work, each piece tells its own little story. It’s like a snap shot into her secret world; wholly encapsulating but open enough to let your mind wonder at what is going on there in the woodlands.

“I am totally fascinated by Japanese story telling. Especially in the way they tell stories about the consequences of humans and nature. Like Miyazaki does in his films, how humans are destroying it and there is this one character who tries to redeem the balance. Have you seen the one with the raccoons, Pom Poko? It has this educational quality. So from that, I draw a lot. When I tell stories I’ll do something like that but in a different way. Like, I’ll find two totally separate things and put them together and it will be quite weird.”

What about when people commission her to create work for them? Is seems almost wrong to ask Candice to create anything other than the wonderful things that she so naturally paints.

“I always warn people when it comes to doing a commission. I will hear what they want and then I will interpret it in my own way. And I will never tell them exactly what I have tried to do. I may tell them loosely what I’ve done or how it came about. But I think the way people interpret things themselves according to how it strikes them is much more interesting. So I leave it up to them.”

So, how does it work? Or rather, where does it work?

“I work from home. A lot of that influences my work – especially my two cats. Like Kiko. She is the epitome of my fairy tale character, the Inquisitive Cat. Every time I start painting, she tries to play with the brushes or get beneath the canvases.”

“The two sculptures are of Kiko’s head. They’re called Deep Dreamer. Every time she was asleep I would creep up and try sculpting her really quietly before she woke up.”

“If you come over, I’ve got art from a lot of the people who influence me, like the Japanese artists I mentioned earlier.

“I have work by the Dutch painter, Femke Hiemstra and a lot of my work is influenced by Asian artist, Amy Sol. The way she depicts creatures and tells their stories. Very folky, very fairy tale-ish.”

“I just fulfilled one dream of buying an Audrey Kawasaki the other day. I cannot wait for the package to arrive in the post. If I could buy anyone’s work right now it would be a Casey Weldon. He’s amazing. He gets his references from pictures of cats he finds on Instagram. The colours are very electric.”

I think it’s great that Candice goes out of her way to buy original work made by the people who inspire her. For those of you who would like an opportunity to add a piece of her unique fairy tale to your lives, you can see more of her work later this month at Lost and Found. It’s a collaboration of artists, showcasing all sorts of media and it is happening at the Woodstock Exchange on the 20th of November.

“The Stone Fox is that kind of sexy element of trying something new – almost dangerous and appealing. The Inquisitive Cat is that never ending need to go further and find out more. The Gentle Bear is comfort. Like a cup of tea.”

All works are available at Salon91 Contemporary Collection (www.salon91.co.za) and Candice be will exhibiting again in the December show “Home is Wherever I’m with You” at Salon91.

The Contributor:

“I AM dead in some ways, but don’t let that bother you—I am lively

enough in others. If you met me in the cosmos, you would be more apt

to yak with me or try to pick me up than to ask a cop to do the same or

There are those who walk among us who are not of this world. Who have stepped outside the pages of an imaginary dimension and into ours. Maurice Turk, in the many years I have known him is one such creature.

Maurice is a writer of much and a believer in little; during our time talking, where we brought up issues of honest art, reality, the unreal and relevant the most apparent motivation behind all of his work is that there is only one truth, that of the individual and creativity therefore.

He and I walked upon my request, to the Long Street swimming pools in the centre of Cape Town. This establishment is intriguing in its heritage; an ode to nostalgia and more importantly, a place neither Maurice nor I had ever been. I wanted him to go through a similar sensation to the one I have experienced when hearing his writings or lyrics; to feel detached, floating and contemplative.

So that is where we went to float and talk about the world, two aliens in Cape Town.

Do you feel poetry is still relevant in this world today?

I feel like we’re in 2013 and we’ve gotten to this point where art is easily debatable and it’s easy to share it as well. It’s easy to get your name out. Most things have been done and most barriers have been broken and I think that’s why it’s cool for people to just do what they feel and to have a more raw approach instead of trying to write something that is already there when you can rather just let something come from you – write your mind.

I think that approach is what is going to bring new resonance to poetry. It’s not about being special or great structure or trying to be like the people of the past when it’s actually just about being a person. I just met someone who came up to me and explained it the way I feel about it. It was cool for me to have that interaction because it was something I would say, the way I just told you.

We understand that language is a structure and there is a huge power that comes with playing with structure. I’m not taking the power away from that, I’m just saying that everyone has a voice and poetry is the opportunity to be more honest with yourself – writing to yourself. Poetry is just about writing a poem, it’s whatever you want it to be, a song even, even if it doesn’t rhyme.

The content of your work is very heavy: Death, sex, aggression. Why do you visit these subjects?

It’s a tough question. To be honest I don’t choose what I write about, it more often happens that I just grab my book and it comes out. I guess those topics are things everyone goes through in their lives. The way I experience it, is the way it comes out of me. They’re important topics and I think people are distracted from them.

There’s a saying: Write what you know. Would you say this is the approach you take to write truthfully?

I agree with that. Let me write a poem, a story, write this write that, you can always tell when someone is being true to themselves, whether they’re a poet or a painter – there’s a flare to it. They’re talking to themselves when making their work. That happens in the moment I find.

I hear you waging a war between reality and fantasy in your words. Why is that?

It’s so ugly – reality, and there’s a kind of beauty in that. It’s a parody. That’s the whole war thing. I don’t mean true in a factual sense though. I mean true to your voice. You can write fantasy and be true to your voice. When you read something back and it sounds the way they would actually talk on their own with a friend in the lounge. Not trying to write something and hoping it sounds like something else or hoping it’s something kind of like another fantasy novel. Hoping someone will say it reminds them of something else. It’s about doing what you dig, what you can do and that’s what I mean. More internal connection with your work. If you’re writing in consideration of someone else then I don’t think you’re writing from the right place. If you’re feeling something so intense and considering yourself then that’s right and there’s got to be someone out there that feels the same. More often than not there will be someone out there.

In that case, how do you want your audience to feel when they experience your work?

I want them to relate. No. I don’t want them to feel anything. I do actually want them to relate. It’s my favourite thing. My words reminding them of feeling. I’ll quote Allen Ginsburg right now on what he says prophecy is. He says prophecy is not about being able to tell the future, it is about experience emotion and express it and that in a hundred years someone will experience your work and feel the same way you felt. A connection with that feeling.

Everyone is going to think about this shit in the future. I’m here and I don’t sit behind a desk every day and that gives me a lot of opportunities to do other things. But at core why am I here?

Do you think you get influenced when you read other writers?

Yeah I think it happens subconsciously and I think it’s quite cool. The same way life is every day. We’re all manufactured. Life is just like that. Even if you say I’m not going to be like that, you’re still manufactured by that. You can’t help that. It’s only natural to be affected by people you idolise – an author you wish you could have conversations with. Or when you read something and think this paragraph is written for me. That’s it, when you have that experience of prophecy. And you go, “This guy knew a hundred years ago how I would feel. Fuck.”

Do you ever find yourself doing things because you know it’ll be good for you to write about later?

I think I do that a lot. I put myself in the deep end to reap the emotional reward that will come out in my poetry even if it won’t affect the rest of my life so well. There was a time in my life where I was hungry for that and now it’s not really the case. Now my decisions are a lot more careful and therefore a lot less dangerous overall.

Your band, Jester & The Sickboys, is something I can’t put my finger on. Do you aspire to being different?

It’s not something we think about or give a shit about. We made music as two friends in my apartment and people would hear us and tell us we’re good and it’s time to have a show. And then you hear people say that show was good and then the ball is rolling and it just happened, uniquely and I’m very happy it did.

Tell me about the song Mr. Blue.

Mr Blue is a song about a spider I owned, a little blue tarantula that unfortunately died. Obviously I should have taken better care of him. They’re animals. They need all sorts of things that I couldn’t give him and he died and it was bumming. I spend a lot of time alone at home because the people I live with work away all day and with him around I didn’t feel so alone. But Mr Blue is about everyone and this city also.

You come to the city looking for what you think will make you happy: love and money. There are opportunities and then you struggle and at the end of the day you’re a waiter and you feel like they lied to you. Then you quit because you’re unhappy and you cut off your nose to spite your face cause then you realise that money is helpful. It’s also about friendships like when you love someone and something happens to make you hate them and you get the feeling that you don’t ever want them to be around you again. Fuck them. Fuck you Mr blue. And then you realise that person was really important and you shouldn’t have hurt them.

Where did the Jester come from?

I guess in the band I’d rather be one of the Sickboys and then all the voices within the band come out and that’s the whole voice of the jester. I’m one of the Sickboys. Remember The Jester is a name that’s been with me since a young age, since I became obsessed with Samuel Becket. Everyone needs a clown. Someone who can make mistakes for them that they can notice and think to themselves that they’ll never do that. To go back to the days of old ass England, yonks ago you’d have a bard who’d sing for the king and queen and lords and ladies. Songs about how great the kings and wars were. If he sang something bad about the king, how shit he was, then the king would kill him. ‘Hey Mr Bard, you’re going to die.’ No one would remember him. But maybe someone is the audience would and they’d take the song and tell the king’s enemy so the song would live on and then so would the bard in a way. There’s a beauty in that. And I guess that Remember The Jester is saying we we’ll be remembered for leaving our mark. I like to think people like to delve and that they’d like to find out who made up that song. Remember The Jester is an ode to that.

What do you want to be remembered for?

Knowing people in the future will read my words and to know that someone else felt the same.

I often wish there were an English word for so many things I feel and come across but more than anything, I wish there was a word that summed up what it means to ‘collect people.’

I collect a lot of things but mostly I collect people and pictures. It started when I was little and I’d cut out pictures of famous people from magazines and then try find out who they were, which before the internet, could be quite difficult . Then I’d find as many pictures of that person as I possibly could and put them all together in a file. Sometimes, it would be a curation of someone that I didn’t know a thing about and there would be this funny little shrine, made up just for them, stored on my shelf.

I still collect people but now that social media has happened in a big way, my method has reversed and it is the pictures that people post which informs me of their existence.

Sink Sinkerson is one of my favourite online people and I love his posts. Often it’s whimsical, Kawaai-infused, sugary selfies of him dressed androgynously. Generally his timeline is loaded with carefully selected music that opens up a world of new options and inspiration for music lovers. Most importantly, Sink Sinkerson is apart of the Detroit creative scene, a space that is producing some of the most interesting, original art and music right now (in my opinion).

I’m an androgynous-looking noise junkie who likes fashion, music and anything art related.

2. I know you make music. Tell me about what you create.

I’ve been jumping around from genre to genre lately, trying whatever seems interesting. I used to try to make more hip-hop/beat based music, but I’d just end up deleting the tracks at the end of the day because I didn’t feel content with what I made. For a while, I shifted my attention from making music to developing my taste in music, which is when I found out about noise music and the new trending genre called “vaporwave” among other things. Both of those genres stuck with me, and I continue to produce in those two fields (Architecture In Tokyo as my Vaporwave project, and BLACK FLESH as my noise project).

3. I’ve been obsessed with the Detroit art scene for a couple years now. Can you tell me about the movement there? Some say it’s the new New York for artists…

The Detroit art scene is crazy! There’s so much cool stuff being made in and around the city, mainly the music. I’ve collaborated with a handful of musicians who hail from the scene, but none as big as some of my favorite bands to have spawn from it like Mexican Knives or Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr . (I live on the outskirts of Detroit for reference)

4. People in South Africa don’t really understand that the internet can be used for creating and collaborating. They still just friend people on Facebook they are friends with IRL and family members. Can you tell us how you like to use the net?

I’ve always viewed the internet as an outlet for many things, namely as a platform for sharing creative projects and likewise a place to inspire one’s self by seeing other’s projects. With so many amazing sites like Soundcloud or Tumblr, you can publish and view all sorts of different works that people have made. Even Facebook can be used as a creative outlet, because you can make pages where you can post your content and you can contact people you’d want to collaborate with!

5. What’s important to you right now?

The thing that’s most important to me right now is finding peace within my life. Personally, my life has been very hectic lately and finding peace is a top priority.

6. Do you care about what other people think of you and the work you make?

Although I try to not let what others think of me play a part in what I make and how I make it, part of my personality will always fear receiving negative attention. Despite that fear, I feel as though it shouldn’t matter to people what I do, because at the end of the day, all that matters to me is that I’m happy with what I’ve created.

7. If you could have anything on a T-Shirt, made for you right now, what would you choose?

Personally, I love anything floral, so I’d definitely have to go with Qi Baishi’s painting “Wisteria Flowers and Meyhua”.

8. Do you like parties? What would you play at a party if I asked you to DJ this weekend?

I love parties! Not so much when I only know a few people at a party since I tend to just gravitate around the people I know – I usually like parties with good friends present! If I had to DJ a party though, I’d probably go with some of my favorite artists – capsule, Flying Lotus, Crystal Castles.